mirror mirror
by songs
Summary: Sometimes, your reflection will show you your dreams; — ო zutara.


**title: **mirror mirror

**pairing: **zuko ო katara.

**setting: **pre-canon, canon-compliant.

**disclaimer: **own nothing!

* * *

_It shows not your face but your heart's desire._

* * *

Katara runs her fingers down the gleam of the mirror, relishing the winter-whisper of the touch.

"Are you there?" she asks, voice soft.

She doesn't have much time; Gran-Gran will be home soon. And her grandmother is not a woman of whimsies.

She will not see what Katara sees. She _will _see glass, silver bell-gems, and a girl-child of eleven years with far too many dreams in her eyes.

Katara smiles, though, because just beneath the flicker of her finger-tips, she sees _him_.

She doesn't know when it begins, or when it will end, or if it ever will, but if she knows anything, she knows the in-betweens.

She knows the hooded, gold-pale eyes, the red-rim, blare-bright scar, the ink of his hair—she knows these things like she knows the sea.

She remembers screaming, crying—remembers her first glimpses of the boy in the mirror, with his moon-white, smooth skin and and open soul that spilled from his eyes and the snappy moments after, the days, the weeks, the months, as she watched him crumple into a child of scars and patches, angry and dreamless.

Katara, the audience of this boy's life, a child of water trying to soothe the boy trapped behind the wall of glass, wall of magic.

She remembers one of her Gran-Gran's more spiritual friends telling her: "If you look hard enough at your reflection, you can see your dreams. Your desires."

Katara sees the boy who knows nothing of her, the boy with a broken face and a broken soul, and wonders.

X

He sees her, sometimes.

She is a child, small everywhere except for her eyes; they are a pleading, endless blue, glazed with something like pity and something—if he were brave enough to name it—like longing.

She only starts appearing after his father has scarred him, after he is made hideous and shameful with his comet-smear of a scar. He wonders if it is the doing of his subconscious, disfigured as his skin—haunting him with ever-blue eyes and a tinny girl, gentle with her voiceless whispers.

"Stop looking at me," he says, one day, every day, every chance he can. He doesn't want her to see him—a prince of nothing, banished and honorless. He doesn't want to ruin her. "Go _away._"

He doesn't have to glance at the mirror to know that her eyes are still trained on him.

X

She knows he cannot hear her, knows he may not even be able to see her, but sometimes, as the years pass, she notices that his eyes sometimes meet her own, and it stirs something within her, something young and brittle and still-faraway.

Katara is twelve when she asks, with a wispy lilt in her tone, "Please, tell me your name. I want—"

_I want to know you. To heal you. To help you._

She doesn't know if she imagines it, but he catches her gaze, and holds it, for a moment, and it's almost loving, almost tender, gossamer and fleeting, before he turns away.

He doesn't look her way again, after that.

Katara is twelve when she learns that not all wounds can be healed.

X

Zuko breaks every mirror on the ship except for one.

It's a hand-mirror, that used to be his mother's. He lies it upside down, on the ruby-jewelled spine, and keeps it under his bed.

Sometimes, _sometimes, _when he is feeling alone, when his bones are aching and his hope is flickering, he cradles the mirror in the lines of his palms, and stares.

_She_ is always there waiting.

X

Katara knows their time is running out.

He is rarely ever there, anymore; in the time she spends waiting, in the time she sees more of herself and less and less of her mirror-prince, she realizes their ending before it even happens.

"It's not supposed to be like this." She is thirteen, bare moons away from fourteen, but she has grown wise. "Two people shouldn't know each other like this."

_With walls, with glass, with rifts and lifetimes between them._

"Maybe one day we'll meet."

X

_Maybe—_

Zuko jolts at the girl in his reflection, her child-face now narrowed into one of a beauty, the pink of her lips shimmering as he hears her speak, for the first time—

—_one day we'll meet._

The mirror clatters from his hands, and shatters into shards of what could have been something more.

X

Katara wakes to gaps in her memories and crystal-cracks of a mirror.

"Maybe it's because you looked at it for too long," Sokka teases. "The mirror just couldn't take it anymore and _bam_! Shattered."

But in typical, older-brother fashion, he leans down, ready to pick up the angled glass, when Katara smacks his hands away.

"It's _important," _she says, and she can feel the tears pricking at her eyes, even if she isn't quite sure _why_.

"...Okay." Sokka stands up, begins to leave the room. "Alright, sis."

And Katara is left alone with the glimmering, mirror-pieces, and the echo of the feeling that something was lost in between the rifts of the glass.

(She catches sight of her reflection in one of the shards—moon-sister eyes, blackbird-lashes—and for a moment, she swears she sees gold.)

X

The first thing Zuko sees when he steps off of the ship and onto the snowy grounds of the South Pole is a girl, a girl with eyes bluer than the skin of the sea, eyes that seemed to hold more than a girl so small and young should ever be capable of.

Something teases the back of his mind, the backs of his eyes, the edges of his soul, but the moment leaves as quickly as it comes, and his quest is remembered, the peasant-girl forgotten.

X

The boy in armor gazes at her for a moment too long.

Katara remembers glass, remembers gold, remembers a lifetime hollow with what she has forgotten, and then the world weaves back into motion, and again, she forgets.

* * *

**an:**

HI GUYS.

So. I haven't updated in forever, and for that I'm SO sorry!

I hope you enjoy this little ficlet. The story was kinda my own idea but when I was looking for a title, I remembered the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter and the quote above the fic is from that :)

Hope you enjoy, and please review! :)

~Nora


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